Summer In The City

December is here, which means 1.the Christmas decorations are going up and 2. I’ve started preparing for another Melbourne summer of having my face melt off one day, then freezing my ass off the next. Right now, it’s dark in the middle of the afternoon and pissing down with rain. Either be summer, or don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I love this city to death, and if you ever say anything bad about it, I will kick you in the shins. That’s right, you heard me, both shins.

My issue with Melbourne and summer is that they don’t go well together. The days of running under the sprinkler in the backyard are gone forever on account of how we have no water anymore. Even when it does rain, it somehow manages to magically avoid the catchments. Water restrictions have taken away our water pistols, our slip ‘n’ slides, and our will to live. And, because I inherited my mum’s fragile British skin, I can’t go outside for more than five minutes unless I want a skin tone that suggests I’m the love child of Satan and the Pink Panther. One year I got sunburnt so badly that my arms actually cracked and blistered. And last year, I got a tan in Scotland. There is no sun in Scotland. The Scots hear stories of this big bright burning ball of gas in the sky and think it’s just a myth. And yet… it found me.

My summer got off to a brilliant start when my friend and I returned to my car last night to find what can only be described as a FREAKIN GIANT SPIDER on the windscreen. As far as we can recall, the situation looked quite like this:

Please note that items in the artwork may not be to scale, or well drawn. And by ‘artist’s interpretation’ I mean ‘I drew this on the back of an envelope. Poorly’.

It’s common knowledge that Australia is home to some of the world’s most dangerous spiders, and while everyone is banging on about the Funnel-Web, the White-Tail and the Red-Back, very little attention is ever paid to raising awareness of the Giant-Hat-Wearing-Car-Clinging-Spider, whose natural enemy is the windscreen wiper (foreigners should write that down, and only visit our country with extreme caution. Really. It’s amazing any of us are here at all).

I also threw up in a drain at one stage, but there’s no need to go into that.

And if the title of this blog made you think of Regina Spektor, we should hang out more. Coz... coz that's where I stole it from...